Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Bella

New painting underway inspired by a little murder mystery.
From the Wikipedia page for Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm: On 18 April, 1943, four boys (Robert Hart, Thomas Willetts, Bob Farmer and Fred Payne) from Stourbridge were poaching in Hagley Woods near to Wychbury Hill when they came across a large Wych elm.
Believing it a good place to hunt birds' nests, Farmer attempted to
climb the tree to investigate. As he climbed, he glanced down into the
hollow trunk and discovered a skull, believing it to be that of an
animal. However, after seeing human hair and teeth, he realized that he
had found a human skull.
As they were on the land illegally, Farmer put the skull back and all
four boys returned home without mentioning their discovery to anybody.
On returning home, the youngest of the boys, Tommy Willetts, felt
uneasy about what he had witnessed and decided to report the find to his
parents. When police checked the trunk of the tree they found an almost
complete human skeleton,
a shoe, a gold wedding ring, and some fragments of clothing. After
further investigation, a severed hand was found buried in the ground
near the tree.
The body was sent for forensic examination
by Prof. James Webster. He quickly established that the skeleton was
female and had been dead for at least 18 months, placing time of death
around October 1941. He found taffeta in her mouth, suggesting that she had died from asphyxiation.
From the measurement of the trunk he also deduced that she must have
been placed there "still warm" after the killing, as she could not have
fit once rigor mortis had taken hold.
Since the woman's murder was during the midst of World War II,
identification was seriously hampered. Police could tell from items
found with the body what the woman had looked like, but with so many
people reported missing during the war, records were too vast for a
proper identification to take place. The current location of her skeleton is unknown, as is the autopsy report.